finlight

What it is

A financial news API from a small German vendor, built around one idea the free-tier competition usually skips: the companies in an article are resolved, not just matched. Each companies entry carries a confidence score between 0 and 1, a name, a sector and industry, a country, a ticker, an ISIN, an OpenFIGI identifier, a primaryListing and an otherListings array — each listing its own ticker, MIC exchange code and country — plus every known ISIN for the company. Of those, ticker, isin, openfigi, exchange and country are also things you can query on.

The query language is the other half. query takes boolean operators, quoted phrases, + and -, parentheses, and field-level filters on ticker, isin, openfigi, exchange, source, title, summary and content, plus country and category. Three of those — ticker, exchange and source — take a * wildcard to match everything. Articles also carry a sentiment label with a confidence, ISO country codes, and one of thirteen categories from markets and economy through to regulation and commodities.

Pricing

Four published plans and a quote. Free is 5,000 requests a month with articles held back 12 hours; $29 buys 10,000 real-time requests and the company entities; $99 buys 50,000 and adds sentiment; $249 buys 150,000 with unlimited push delivery. Prices exclude tax, and VAT is added at checkout by country. There is no annual discount to read past — the page bills monthly and only monthly.

Read the feature rows rather than the request counts, because that is where the tiers actually differ. Sentiment starts at $99. Company entities start at $29. Websockets and webhooks start at $29 and are metered separately from requests — dispatches and deliveries have their own monthly caps, and when the webhook quota runs out deliveries pause until the period rolls.

Data & coverage

Many languages, indexed — but one language per request. The language parameter defaults to en and takes a single value, with no "all" option, so a request that does not set it silently returns English only and you cover three languages by making three calls and merging. The docs say this twice, which suggests it catches people.

There is no published source count, no published article volume and no published archive start date. The vendor's marketing claims sub-second websocket latency; nothing in the docs puts a number on indexing delay.

Integrations

REST at api.finlight.me/v2, two websockets (an enriched stream and a raw low-latency one), webhooks in enriched and raw flavours with HMAC-SHA256 signatures and replay protection, and a first-party MCP server at mcp.finlight.me taking OAuth or an API key and exposing search_articles, get_article_by_link and list_sources.

Eight official client libraries — TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Java/Kotlin, PHP, Ruby and Rust — all published by the vendor, all on the same auth header, all with retries and webhook signature verification. PHP deliberately omits websocket streaming. The Python package is finlight-client on PyPI, from ali@finlight.me, 2.4.0 in May 2026. Docs are served as Markdown by appending .md to any page, with an llms.txt index.

Limitations

• Redistribution is not granted. The terms of use, effective 16 April 2025 and under German law, licence the API for internal business or personal use, forbid reselling access, and state that finlight does not authorise redistribution or republication of third-party content without a licence from the owner. Displaying anything requires attributing the publisher and linking the article.
• No published archive depth. The matrix says one month on the lower two plans and nothing at all for the upper two.
• Sentiment is a label, not a score — positive, neutral or negative with a separate confidence — and it belongs to the article, not to each company in it.
• English-only by default, and there is no way to ask for every language at once.
• No rate-limit headers. No Retry-After, no X-RateLimit-*; a burst 429 means wait ten seconds and a monthly 429 means wait for the billing period. The dashboard's usage figure is aggregated about once a day and lags a day behind, while enforcement is live.
• includeContent and includeEntities are marked deprecated in the endpoint reference while still being the documented way to get full text and companies.

Alternatives

Marketaux is the closest match on price and shape and scores sentiment per entity rather than per article, but serves only snippets. Stock News API and NewsFilter.io both tag tickers and sell a stream. NewsAPI.ai has a far wider corpus and no security identifiers at all, which is the trade running the other way.

Compare it against the rest of the market data APIs.